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Eight chapbooks, each containing a tale (or tales) of around thirty or forty pages, all by Japanese authors of varying successes that you may not have heard of. If you have, here is more of what you already love. If you have not, these books are a wonderful treat indeed: a glimpse into the styles, …

Read More about The Keshiki Series: New Voices from Japan (Part 1)

Most established authors become known for their tropes, be they genre, theme, character type, or writing style. For Murakami, his tropes are his events. Read enough of his works (whilst listening to a few old jazz records) and the lines between them start to blur. You may come to ask yourself, which flashback to pre-war …

Read More about Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami BOOK REVIEW

Writing a memoir is, I imagine, the most daunting kind of writing we could dare ourselves to undertake. Opening your heart and your memories to countless faceless readers, to have them judge your life with complete freedom, leaves me with enough imagined anxiety just to consider it. And this is only half the fear. The …

Read More about All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung BOOK REVIEW

Translated from the Japanese by Ryan Holmberg In the wake of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan suffered change after change; reeling from its losses, struggling to deal with its shame, fighting to rebuild its economy and its strength. This was a truly dark time for a nation that had lost its occupation of …

Read More about Why you Should Read Slum Wolf by Tadao Tsuge

When reaching for a piece of Japanese fiction, be it novel, manga, or anime, there’s a 50% chance that you’ll find a cat on the cover, a cat in the title, a feline protagonist, or a story chock full of cat-related shenanigans. While in the west we proudly label the dog as man’s best friend, …

Read More about If Cats Disappeared from the World by Genki Kawamura BOOK REVIEW

It’s been an amazing year for fiction. Here are some of our favourite books this year written by Asian and Asian-American authors. The Court Dancer by Kyung Sook-Shin ‘Set during the dramatic final years of the Korean Empire, the new novel from Man Asian Literary Prize winner Kyung-Sook Shin features a mysterious dancer caught up in the …

Read More about 5 Must-Read Asian & Asian-American Books (2018)

When I was living in Inagi-shi, a once-upon-a-time small city now swallowed up by the swell of suburban Tokyo, I would enter the convenience store next to my apartment every morning and buy a sugar-soaked bun to walk to the station with. The convenience store woman who served me each and every morning at 8 …

Read More about Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata BOOK REVIEW